my mind with varying anticipations, each more disconcerting than the
last. Now I seemed to be listening to the movements of an intoxicated
man seeking an issue out of strange quarters, then to the wary approach
of one who had his own reasons for dread and was as conscious of my
presence as I was of his.

But the light, steadily increasing with each lagging but surely advancing
step, soon gave the lie to this latter supposition, since no sane man,
afraid of an ambush, would be likely to offer such odds to the one lying
in wait for him, as his own face illumined by a flaming candle, and I was
yielding to the bewilderment of the moment when the uncertain step paused
and a sob came faintly to my ears, wrung from lips so stiff with human
anguish that my fears took on new shape and the event a significance
which in my present mood of personal suffering and preoccupation was
anything but welcome. Indeed, I was coward enough to contemplate flight
and might in another moment have yielded to the unworthy impulse if the
sound of a second sigh had not struck shudderingly on my ear, followed by
the renewal of the step and the almost immediate appearance on the stairs
of a young girl holding a candle in one hand and shielding her left cheek
with the other.

Life offers few such shocks to any man, whatever his story or whatever
his temperament. I had been prepared by the sob I had heard to see a
woman, but not this woman. Nothing could have prepared me for an
encounter with this woman anywhere that night, after what had passed
between us and the wreck she had made of my life. But here! in a place so
remote and desolate I had hesitated to enter it myself! What was I to
think? How was I to reconcile so inconceivable a fact with what I knew of
her in the past, with what I hoped from her in the future.